To the ladies

 

If you see a review copy of this at the London equivalent of the Strand, pounce.  The Truss government fell this morning after more than a hundred MPs wrote letters of absolutely no confidence.  For those who like to apply Sabermetrics to British politics, she lasted a total of six weeks, the shortest career of any prime minister (overlapping briefly with the longest reign of any British monarch).  Her home secretary Suella Braverman resigned yesterday (or was fired according to the New York Times) and she was already on her second chancellor, Jeremy Hunt.  Chaos aside, Truss will be best remembered for the Pinteresque pauses which punctuated her interviews, and the soft whirring of hamster wheels as she tried to compose a response.  Given the economic mess the Johnson gang left behind, people are talking about a "glass cliff" and suggesting she got the job because the Tories wanted to demonstrate the unfitness of women -- a reason hauntingly similar to our white nationalist party running Herschel Walker for the Senate.  

How odd that another female failure, Kelly Loeffler, should bob to the surface today thanks to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which published some of her electronic communications in the heady days between the 2020 election and the failed coup.  Delightfully, she got reamed out by Tricia Raffensperger for joining Dolt 45 in pressuring Tricia's husband to falsify the election results.  Then she got "Hey!  I need to talk to you" by Empty Greene in the same cause and enthusiastically agreed to help with the plot as long as Trump gave her credit when the devil came down to Georgia to talk up her and David Perdue's candidacies.  (Both were satisfyingly clobbered, you'll recall.)  Then she backed down, fearing the "long term reputational risk" faced by herself and her husband, who runs a little mom & pop called the New York Stock Exchange.  This was after her instincts for insider trading earned her the name Sticky Fingers Loeffler, at least here.  So long, Kelly, don't worry about us.  Jon Ossoff is doing your job better than you ever could.

This Huffpost headline grabbed my eye:  BRITISH ROYAL FAMILY BESTOWS DANIEL CRAIG WITH SAME HONOR HELD BY JAMES BOND.  But do we really need an actor with a license to kill?  Actually, Princess Anne made him an honorary Commander in the Royal Navy, which is a lot less upsetting.

In a last-gasp ad buy, Pennsylvania voters are being reminded of an encounter between John Fetterman and a Black jogger in 2013.  The face of the ad is a Black woman identified as only Janice H.  That's because she's long-time right wing minister/birther Janice Hollis and not some random voter who just happened to step forward.  In other words, as phony as Oz operative Sheila Armstrong.   Does Oz know any Black people who aren't on his payroll?  (Oprah doesn't count, as she's clearly not interested in coming within a hundred miles of his campaign.)

It may be worth signing up for Peacock to see the new documentary about Rosa Parks, the civil rights figure who is invoked by the right these days as often and as disturbingly as the Holocaust.  At one point she appears on a TV game show, apparently because she needed the money -- and I'm reminded of Jesse Owens, who came home from Berlin in 1936 with four gold medals and took a series of menial jobs to survive.  Her great-nephew says, "She was a soldier from birth," not just a tired seamstress who refused to vacate a bus seat.  I wonder what she would say to Janice Hollis or Sheila Armstrong.  Or Candace Owens.

I think I know what she would say to Tucker Carlson, who has taken to bashing Joy Reid and Tiffany Cross for provoking a "race war" and comparing MSNBC to the Rwandan radio station that urged the geocide of the Tutsi people.  She would do so politely, eschewing words like "shithead."  Allow me, Mrs. Parks.

Trump got deposed yesterday in the case stemming from his rape of E. Jean Carroll, but it's a day that ends in a "y" so he can't keep from verbally raping her some more.  Carroll's description of the assault puts him in his place:  "It didn't last long."  I seem to recall Stormy Daniels saying something similar, and she was getting paid.

Carroll recovered from her experience a lot better than Lara Logan.  Shame on you, Newsmax, for putting this mentally disturbed woman on your air.  Have you no decency at long last?